08.09.2009 James 4 - Humility (Outdoor Service)

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A woman goes into the dentist – and realized that the dentist had the same name as a guy she had a crush on in high school. Once she got in the office – she realized it couldn’t be him because he was old, gray, and wrinkled. After the appointment, on a whim, she asked – did you go to John F. Kennedy high school? Why yes I did – “What year did you graduate?” - 1973 – he responded. Then she said – I think you were in my class! And he responded, “What class did you teach?”

Ben Franklin – was visiting Cotton Mather – a famous preacher – walking out of the house – Mather shouted - Stoop! Stoop! Franklin, not understanding what he meant, “You’re young, and have the world and life before you – stoop as you go through it and you will avoid many hard thumps.”

Today, we are focusing on humility – James 4 – If you wish to get ahead in God’s Kingdom, you will need to stoop – to put yourself down – not to put yourself down – like, whoa is me – but to humble yourself.

Father, speak to us – touch our hearts – we are in need of You – teach us – we want to learn from You and to have our lives molded by Your word. We need to be comforted, strengthened, and challenged. May Your Spirit be poured out in our hearts that we might know You more.
James 4 – James is about 5th to the last book…
6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore [it] says, "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
10 Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Not only our need to humble ourselves before God, but how God responds to the humble – this goes against what we naturally think – we are taught that if you wish to put yourself ahead, you need to be aggressive and go for it – but when it comes to our Christian life, we need to humble ourselves – to put others forward. It goes against what we naturally think – humility in relationship to others – we need to be servants of others.
Pride and selfishness are the source of relational conflicts – it is not how the other person is, but it comes from our pride and selfishness – today – we will look at our humility in relationship to God.

James 4:4 You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
If pride and selfishness are the core problem to relational conflicts, then humbling ourselves before God is the solution.
If you are a friend of the world, you are an enemy of God. There is no sense of middle ground. We are uncomfortable with that, aren’t we? You are either for me, or against me – Jesus said. You are either in light or darkness, a sheep or a goat. When it comes to relationship with God, we are either right with Him – or wrong. There is no middle ground. Jesus talked about those who THOUGHT they had a relationship with God, but in the end, they didn’t. We cannot walk the middle of the line – we have to step on one side or the other. Will we live for Christ? Pride and selfishness make us God’s enemy. We must deal with them.

V 5 is a little different/difficult:
5 Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: "He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us"?

My best thought – we gave you NASB bibles – notice how Spirit is capitalized? Many of the other translations do not have that capitalized – here is why – he is calling them unfaithful people in relationship to Him. I think the correct translation, from what I have come to understand, would be ‘spirit’ – your spirit, as opposed to The Holy Spirit. Ex. 20:5 talks about God being a jealous God – He desires faithfulness. God demands it. He is saying – “You adultresses!” they are being unfaithful – and there is a jealousy for them to become faithful.
God’s response is found in v. 6
6 But He gives a greater grace.
They are struggling – living for this world – James is trying to get them to focus on God and to live for Him and others. He gives a greater grace
6bTherefore [it] says, "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
If you continue to live in pride and selfishness, God, because of His love for you – He will oppose you.
Oppose – to go to battle against.
Your mind may be set on what you want and getting your way and God is stopping you and preventing you from getting there. He opposes and stands against the proud. He gives GRACE to the humble.
Grace has a deeper meaning than just unmerited favor – it is God’s gift of power and strength in life. When we humble ourselves, and stoop down in relationship to God – he gives us the power and strength to no longer live for self.

7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Humbling ourselves is no different from submitting to God.
When we do that – resist the devil, the father of lies – his sin was pride and selfishness. We have an enemy – and that enemy is God’s enemy. James is telling us – when you live for selfishness and pride, you join the side of the enemy – of Satan and his schemes.
Jesus said the same thing to Peter – Get behind me Satan, because you are thinking about yourself and not God’s kingdom. It is hard to think that we line up with the other side.
He is saying – if we humble ourselves, we receive the power and favor to succeed – to overcome the temptation or sin – whatever it is.
Addiction is a very difficult thing – be it substance or anything else – it takes work and counseling and meetings – but the most important thing is the Power of God. All those other things are part of it – but without the power of God, it won’t work – we must have God’s power in this. He goes on – he tells us to humble ourselves and submit ourselves – How?
8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.
When we are walking in pride – our tendency is to stay away from God. You do this – you walk in your own way and stay away from God – but the most important thing is to draw near to Him. He draws near to us then and comes to us as we are. Then he says -
8b Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
As you draw near to God, you need to clean up your life. There is a sense of grace that God loves us and takes us where we are - but he wants us to clean up and gives us the power to do it. He says, cleanse your hands; purify your hearts – actions and attitudes. God wants us to focus on both – cleaning our hands – doing what is right – but to clean up our hearts – as a man thinks – so he is. What you think about comes out in your actions.
9 Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy to gloom.
That is UNAMERICAN! Can you imagine the commercial – they would not sell anything! It seems like it shouldn’t be in the Bible. It is no different from Jesus – we all love the Sermon on the Mount – how does it start? Blessed are the poor in spirit – blessed are those who mourn! Jesus said the very same thing. We are just so programmed to ‘think happy thoughts!’ – yes, it is important to be joyful, but there are times to mourn over the unfaithfulness in our lives in our relationship to Him – our attitudes toward one another – and to do something about it.

Mourning makes us poor – it powerfully reminds us of our smallness. You see – part of humility is recognizing the reality of you – recognizing who we really are – before God -if He WERE to take an account – if God judged us on our actions – none of us would make it – but when we mourn over the reality of who we are – we realize the poverty of our spirits and we humble ourselves and God empowers and strengthens and favors us.

Let me ask this –
What time is it?! 10:11
John 15 – Jesus is the vine, we are the branches – He prunes the branches to bear more fruit – Bob comes out and prunes the tree and it grows twice as big – that is how our Christian lives are – pruning means getting rid of what diminishes vitality. Pruning hurts. When things get cut, it hurts. When we look at a pruned vineyard, we hardly believe it will bear fruit – but it allows the vine to concentrate its energy and produce more fruit.

Submitting to God’s pruning – cleanse your hands, purify your hearts… - will not leave us sad, but hopeful for what God can do through us.

We need to be willing for God to do His hard work – to allow Him to remove the things that harm us. We all have our own personalities – those who are having a quiet time and burst into tears before Him – I am not that way – but that does not mean I can’t humble myself and allow God to look into every aspect of my life. Ask Him that – to do that –

James 4:10 Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.
We come right back to this – when you do this – God’s power and grace will come into your life – then he closes the loop – our relationships with one another – conflicts with one another come from pride and selfishness and our conflict with God – but when we reverse our conflict with God, it comes back in our relationships with one another.
11 Do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother, or judges his brother, speaks against the law, and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge [of it.] 12 There is [only] one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor?
So he comes down on them hard again – in light of all this – clear up your speech in relation to one another.
A few of us were talking after the picnic – Christians can really come against one another – we have our own enemies out there – we don’t need to be enemies with each other! Put yourself in the right position –
Some of you know Mike Hopkins – he attended here and is now becoming a pastor – we were giving him his doctrinal test and one of the things he said to me a while ago – the one thing I learned a long time ago – there is one God – and I am not Him! There is one judge and lawgiver – and we are not it. When we live for self and pride – we make ourselves God. Let’s pray…